Confessions of a Web Analytics Addict

I was at this business networking meeting the other evening and I struck up a conversation with a real estate developer. I told him how I was looking at my Web logs and noticed that somebody from the House of Representatives had visited my site today. He said, “You can really see that stuff? How do you do that?”

For those of you who have never experienced the fascination of Web tracking, allow me to explain its appeal. Imagine knowing to a high degree of certainty who visits your Web site, how they got there, where they visited and whether they act on your offers. Oh yes, more sophisticated Web tracking software reveals conversion rates, too.

My tracking experience started many years ago, when we launched one of our first sites. Our Internet service provider told me how to access our WebTrends account. WebTrends could tell you what browsers people were using to access your site, and what countries the visitors were from, and how long visitors were spending on your pages. If your ISP had the enterprise version of the product you could see more, but we were not that lucky. You could see visitor IP addresses, but they don’t mean much of anything without a resolution to the actual corporate name. Our ISP didn’t allow reverse DNS lookup, so we could not see which corporate names were associated with our visitors. A Brook Group staffer sat down with me and helped me find several sites that would allow me to resolve IP addresses, manually, one at a time. At 2 a.m., I was still visiting third party sites trying to reveal whence my visitors had come. As a business Web site owner, I relished the idea that I could identify potential customers, and even know when competitors were visiting. It was an addictive exercise. But, it took a lot of time to do, so maybe once a month I reviewed our logs, then spent hours on end trying to resolve IP addresses.

Since then, Web analytics has advanced considerably. New tools have arisen. We used Funnel Web for a time. I installed it on my computer, FTP’d our logs to our network, and ran the program against the logs. It was a great tool, but manipulating the logs was cumbersome.

As new clients hired us to do development for them, we cycled through a number of other tools, some homemade and clunky, others—like HBX by WebSideStory and Urchin—were more sophisticated but costly. Over time, we learned more and more about our customers’ experiences with us at less cost. Without violating anyone’s privacy, we could learn how people were surfing our sites, what pages they visited the most and the least, where they arrived and where they left, what country they were from, and how much time they spent on each page. As capabilities rose, prices dropped and we began using StatCounter, and offering it to our clients. StatCounter is free for the first 100 impressions. If you were willing to upgrade your account and spend $9.99 or more a month, you could see everything that you really need to see about your visitors. It is a great tool, and I will continue to use it and offer it to clients.

Just this last week, Google announced that their acquired product, Urchin, is now available free of charge. I had assumed that they would follow the same model as StatCounter, offering 100 free impressions, but anything beyond that you must pay for. I had been personally fascinated with Urchin, but could not justify the expense for Brook Group. A few of our clients used Urchin and loved its features, particularly the Page ROI feature. Then I learned that Google was offering the product, which had cost $400 per month, free of charge.

I was hooked. Urchin users can determine which sites drive the most traffic to theirs, exposing the most valuable places to set links. You can determine who your most likely customers are, based on their interest in the site. Your content gets evaluated based on how long visitors spends at that page and whether they click through for more. Most importantly, you can see the path from entry to action, showing how to simplify the route to conversion.

Through no-cost Urchin, Google has opened up this world of data to every site owner. Whether this is a philanthropic move on Google’s part, or based on ulterior motives, this act can revolutionize the quality of the Web by providing a newfound ability to improve Web sites. In many ways, the renamed Google Analytics reflects Google’s self-proclaimed purpose, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“Our objective is to take what are extremely powerful tools and make sure all advertisers have access to them to make a better Web experience,” says Richard Holder, Director of Product Management at Google. Who really believes in “free” anymore, though? Savvy marketers, along with most consumers, understand that free is the most misused word in the English language. “What’s the catch?” everyone wants to know.

Will tracking tools affect search results? Google could easily use the same tracking information to determine page popularity, making changing their entire search metrics. Matt Cutts, from Google, denies that allegation, stating “that it is not at all a concern.”

What about privacy concerns? Do I really want Google to know everything about my marketing efforts? Eric Peterson mentions that “most of the really interesting uses of this data would only get Google in trouble from a data privacy perspective.” Google dismisses this anxiety as a “red herring,” but the jury is still out on this.

I was recently on a sales call with a large government entity where I was offering use of our RAD tool free of charge. Everyone in the room got very quiet and uneasy. I could tell that the room was riddled with concerns about hidden costs, motives and anything else, when the director stood up and said to his own team, “you have spent too much time in this (Washington DC) zip code. If they tell you it’s free it’s free. Take two if it’s free. And if you get a bill, don’t pay it.”

And so, my advice to you is not different from my potential client’s. If it’s free, take two. If you love it, one day in some way it’s going to cost you, but you’ll be happy to pay for it by then. As a Web analytics junkie, all I can say is I need more data on my visitors, and you should try this stuff out.

I refuse to negate the value of such knowledge, but I also wonder what price I’ll eventually pay. If Google’s intention is to rule the Web, they’re definitely one step closer. It doesn’t take any in-depth analysis to figure that out.